Snapdeal launches multi-lingual mobile interface in Hindi and Telugu

Launched in July, Shopo is a mobile-only platform, which aims to bring small and medium businesses (SMBs) that cannot register on bigger e-commerce portals.NEW DELHI: Snapdeal, India’s largest online marketplace in terms of sellers, launched its brand-new multi-lingual interface on its mobile site on Tuesday, designed to enable consumers to shop online in their preferred languages.

The SoftBank, Foxconn and Alibaba Group-backed online marketplace’s mobile user interface will now be available in Hindi and Telugu. Additionally, the e-commerce major will add nine other regional languages, including, Gujarati, Tamil, Marathi, Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Assamese and Punjabi, by January 26 next year.

"India’s linguistic diversity is a huge opportunity to expand the market to include those users who would prefer to engage online in their native languages. Our decision to go multi-lingual is driven by the feedback that we have received from our users. We are sure this will enable millions of new users to join the digital commerce revolution that is sweeping across India," said Rohit Bansal, co-founder and chief operating officer of Snapdeal.

The decision to develop a multi-lingual interface, according to Bansal, came after receiving significant feedback from Snapdeal customers.

"We are sure this will enable millions of new users to join the digital commerce revolution that is sweeping across India. Snapdeal’s multi-lingual platform will redefine the rules of the game and will allow sellers and buyers from all across India to explore and transact without any constraints of language," Bansal added.

The newly-launched multi-lingual platform has been built on top of Snaplite, the New Delhi-based company’s website for mobile browser, which claims to be 85 per cent lighter and consumes less bandwidth.

Snapdeal, which competes with Flipkart, the country’s largest ecommerce player and Amazon India, developed a grammar engine to ensure error-free translations, transliterations and grammar checks in each language.

This is the second major technology-focused roll-out by Snapdeal in as many weeks. Last week, it unveiled its new platform, code-named Sherpalo, to enhance seller experience on its platform, and which will provide a single window access to all seller services.

The developments comes at a time when the company is engaged in a cut-throat battle with its rivals to grab pole position in India’s ecommerce sector, which, according to Goldman Sachs, is poised to breach the $100 billion mark by fiscal 2020, triggered by increasing internet usage, discounting and investment by online retailers.

Snapdeal, which closed a $500 million in funding in August earlier this year, a round that valued the five year-old company at about $5 billion, has been hiring top talent, across critical functions, but especially to further build its technology platform and offerings, at an unprecedented rate over the course of the year.

Chandrasekaran is leading the company’s efforts in its ambitious bid to create a complete ecosystem of goods and services, similar to that of Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba Group, also an investor in the company, especially after it acquired digital payments platform FreeCharge in April earlier this year.

Separately, in May, Snapdeal named former Cisco and Symantec executive Gaurav Gupta as its vice-president - Engineering, while also roping in former Adobe senior executive Viraj Chatterjee in August.